The commercial Internet has rapidly evolved in about 10 years into a worldwide medium for electronic commerce among hundreds of millions of users and billions of web sites. However, like all channels of commerce, the use of the Internet depends heavily on the development of efficient means for searching and for advertising to bring interested users to the web sites of vendors of relevant products, services, and/or information. Since it is difficult for individual web sites to gain visibility among millions of other sites, vendors have become greatly interested in getting users to visit their web sites by click-through links from search sites, portals, and aggregator sites that can attract large volumes of users on the Internet. As a result, a new market has been created for buying and selling click-through traffic on the Internet through various types of referral, affiliation, and other click-through-selling programs.
In the typical click-through selling today, a seller contracts with a buyer for an upfront fee to sell access to the click-through traffic visiting the seller's web site by posting a link to the buyer's Web site and then also charging the buyer for each visitor who clicks on the seller's link. However, other than a general idea of the total volume of visitors to the seller's web site, the buyer often does not know in advance what volume, responsiveness, or quality of visitors from the seller's web site will click on the link to the buyer's web site. Before contracting for linkage to a seller's web site, a buyer would want to know certain parameters for the click-through traffic, such as is the click-through ratio (linked traffic volume to total seller visitors), delivery speed (number of click-throughs delivered in a given time), and/or traffic quality (level of visitor interest for the buyer's products indicated by the number of pages visited and amount of time spent on the buyer's site). If a buyer could assess parameters such as these, the buyer can then compare one seller's web site to other sites, and determine what upfront fee and/or click-through fee the buyer can justify as the best possible price.
It is therefore highly desirable to have a system that can facilitate the buying and selling of click-through traffic between the web sites of interested buyers and sellers in ways which allow both parties to try out in advance how compatible their sites are. A productive relationship between a buyer and seller will depend on how compatible their sites are for sending the volume and quality of interested visitors that the parties contract for. If these factors can be assessed on an informed basis by conducting comparative trials in advance, the choice for a satisfactory and productive relationship becomes more likely.